Rachel Heng Embraces Contradiction – The Millions

It’s clear that there will be no sophomore slump for Rachel Heng. Coming off the success of her 2018 debut novel Suicide Club, which has been translated into 10 languages and takes on contemporary health culture, The Great Reclamation is a novel that has inspired praise like “epic” and “saga” and their many iterations.

As Heng was born and raised in Singapore and has the keen eye of a historian, the book is both intimate and sweeping, lush in its descriptions of places and personalities, and clear-eyed in its depictions of Ah Boon, the book’s protagonist and a symbol of Singapore’s great change in the decades following World War II.

I spoke with Rachel about, among other topics, her research for the novel, ideas of change and progress in Singapore, the book’s complementary main characters, and the importance of her perspective in writing about such a heavy topic.

Pete Riehl: I want to ask you about the research that you did and some of the seeds for The Great Reclamation. It’s a book that has 464 pages and covers some incredibly pivotal years in Singapore’s history. What research did you do, whether formal or informal, and what made you say, I want to write this book? 

Rachel Heng: I grew up in Singapore, and the Singapore that I think maybe most Americans would know is the one you see in movies, say Crazy Rich Asians or Westworld—this very modern urbanized landscape. That is the Singapore that I grew up in, but I would hear my mother talk about how she had grown up, and that was completely different. She grew up in a wooden shop house that didn’t have a top for a ceiling, and the house would flood every time it rained. She had relatives who lived in much more rural areas where they had outdoor outhouses.

And just hearing about it felt like it was a completely different world, a completely different place, even though it was the very same country and not very long ago. That was just a matter of decades, and yet the island has changed so drastically, as I often hear about from older Singaporeans. I think that writing this book came out of that curiosity and that desire to revisit this time and to think about what it must have been like to live through that dramatic change, where your home is literally transforming before your very eyes and beneath your feet. Being caught up in that change and the excitement of that, but also the fear and the sadness and the loss and all of those conflicting emotions that come with great change.

PR: The opening line of the novel is incredibly powerful: “Decades later, the kampong would trace it all back to this very hour, waves draining the light from this slim, hungry moon.” and reminds one of memorable openers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s from One Hundred Years of Solitude. How did this line serve as a catapult for the book’s plot and what was the inspiration for the flashback opening?  Also, I wonder about the kampong, which is such a huge part of this book. Is there a special affection you have for the people of this type of small town, and what does the kampong represent in the book? 

RH: There were actually four kampongs along the coast whose livelihoods were impacted by the land reclamation project, and the kampong in the book is based on these. There are some really striking photos of the fishermen of those villages, with their traditional boats and the nets, and then you see how the sea is like kilometers away from where they are. This was taken after the land reclamation was complete, and I found it so haunting.

As for the significance of [the kampong], I think in Singapore, it’s something that you often hear as part of nation-building; it’s this idea of the “kampong spirit.” It’s almost like a cliché, as people talk about it a lot like, “Oh, we want to recreate the kampong spirit in this new landscape,” when you have all the flats and these new buildings. How do we recreate that? What I wanted to do was to explore the shift from an actual village into the new landscape. With all of these big modern buildings, I think there are some ways in which you can recreate [the kampong spirit] and there are others in which it is truly lost, because so much of a way of life is tied to the landscape and tied to the way you experience all that’s around you, and once those physical markers change, and the actual ground changes, I think that’s gone.

PR:  You have such a light touch in the book; there’s no moralizing, no editorializing from the author. Natalie is a woman we meet later in the book and she truly seems to believe—she wants a bright, orderly future. She’s nice, not a violent person, but she works for the government. There’s so much significance in the diction used for order and organization and the diction used by the “gahmen,” the government. Natalie talks about the greater good, and Ah Boon wonders, “Who does she mean when she says ‘we?’” like when Natalie says, “We need the land for eliminating dangerous tenements.” Phrases like “hazy collective” and an “omniscient authority” help you so smoothly portray the government as ostensibly nonthreatening. Those with the government organizations usually come with a velvet glove, and they come with a handshake. You don’t paint it as “government: horrible; kampong: beautiful, saintly, innocent.” 

RH: Yeah, because I don’t think it was that straightforward. I think that’s a story that maybe you would get in the news. It’s the beauty of fiction that you are able to hold these contradictions in one place and present a more complex reality. I think the government, the local government at the time, there’s a reason why they were able to rise to power, which is that the people did support them. Certainly they were manipulative in certain ways, but they did offer something that people related to: homes, healthcare, schools. The government wasn’t there trying to enrich themselves materially. There was actually a drive towards a better life for the average Singaporean, and so I think this is a complicated thing, and something that’s very hard for Americans to understand. Because you think like, Okay, if you have this kind of organizing power, it must inherently be bad. America defines itself so specifically in opposition to that. That’s why I think Singapore is such an interesting case study, since people often don’t know how to classify it and you can’t put it in a neat box.

PR: I’m interested in the remnants of this great upheaval in Singapore, The Great Reclamation. Can you speak to these effects in contemporary times, and the ways in which contradictions exist? 

RH: There are some things about it where you’re like, Oh, that’s pretty draconian, so to speak. That’s what it gets called a lot. But then in other ways you’re like, Well, it’s a country where people are housed and fed and have health care, and in a way, the government that came to power was offering people something that no one else had offered them, which was a better life. I don’t want to dismiss that or condescend to the population and say they were tricked or whatever, because they weren’t. They were making conscious decisions about their futures, and this is not something that you can dismiss. I know people I grew up with benefited from it. I grew up in public housing, I went to public schools. My life wouldn’t have been possible.

On the one hand, there was all this progress that did benefit everyone, and Singaporeans feel that very strongly. But at the same time, there was a lot that was lost along the way, and that gets buried a little more and not so much acknowledged. There’s a huge environmental toll, certainly; look at the ways in which the coast was completely reshaped, as it used to be a tropical island. I read during my research that at some point along the coast, there were these fields of seagrass, and you would have dugongs come. To me, that was mind-boggling, because I grew up when the sea was brown, and it’s just ships everywhere. There’s so little nature left, but it used to be the case that there was this quite beautiful, unspoiled, lush coast that was drastically changed. And then there’s the irony of land reclamation, because with rising sea levels, all of the land that was made, who knows what’s going to happen to that as well?

PR: You told Scott Simon for NPR Weekend Edition, “I don’t think I could have written this book if I had never left Singapore.” I’m interested in the idea of perspective and wonder what you meant with that quote. 

RH: Even though [the book] is historical, it came out of my experience growing up in Singapore and the society I grew up within. I think there are a lot of things that one takes for granted when you live in a place, that you kind of accept like, Oh, this is just the norm, right? You don’t think about the question because that’s just the nature of your reality and it’s only when you leave or you experience something else that you think, wait, that’s a particular choice. Or, That’s a particular way of life that isn’t inevitable. It took me leaving in order to gain perspective on that. I think if I had never left Singapore and I only stayed there, I don’t know that I wouldn’t have written this book, but it definitely would have been more difficult.

This interview is excerpted from Episode 173 of the Chills at Will Podcast. Listen to the complete conversation here.